Language and useful phrases

Talk the talk as you walk the walk

Posted: Thursday June 23 2011

Beijingers think they’re the bee’s knees because standard Chinese is largely derived from the Beijing dialect. Although the two languages are very close, the Beijing accent is marked by a very liberal use of the ‘er’ sound – linguists call this a rhotic vowel – and Beijingers have a tendency to slur their words together and exaggerate their tones. This makes Beijing hua (the Beijing dialect) almost incomprehensible to foreigners learning Chinese if the accent is very strong.

On a basic level, Chinese is easier than many languages. There are no tenses – Chinese words have only one form. Suffixes are used instead to denote tenses. There are no comparative adjectives. The most challenging part of learning Chinese is often the tones, as each sound has four different inflections, each of which can change the meaning of a word. In the written language, characters take the place of an alphabet.

A character can be a word or part of a word, but normally a word consists of two or more characters. There are about 20,000 characters in a normal Chinese word processor. For those who do not read characters, there is a romanised alphabet called pinyin.